Howdy!

Just a quick intro before I get into the meat of this thing...

My name is Joe Izenman. I've lived in and around Tacoma for my entire life, and I've been a musician almost my entire life. I play keyboards, guitar and hand drums, I sing and I write. Lately I've been learning the mandolin. I have a blog about living and working in Tacoma. I am in two bands at the moment: This Shirt Is Pants and Mr. Fusion. TSIP is a hard rock outfit, Mr. Fusion is my collaborative songwriting project with Erich Sachs.

I've also recently started recording at home. As I started getting more material together from a variety of projects, I decided I wanted to put together some kind of system for posting information about my shows and newly recorded tunes, organized by band, album, etc. Over a couple weeks, the idea evolved further. If I'm already going to have multiple bands in the system, why not allow multiple users as well?

Out of this has come tacomamusic.net. My hope is that it will become a comprehensive resource for Tacoma-area musicians, with a unified calendar, song postings, reviews, discussion, and more. Something that goes beyond the capabilities of imeem or MySpace music not because it is bigger, but because it is smaller. By building this from the ground up in a limited geography it has a chance to become a genuine community.

Who knows... maybe it will be good enough to go craigslist on us and add regions until it is universal, but for now I'm sticking with Tacoma.

This blog will be about the development process. Feature announcements, design, and my own experiences learning new technologies in an effort to make this system run as smoothly as is humanly possible.

The best way to have this be a tool for the community is to have the community guide the process. Have a feature you'd like to see that you think I've overlooked? Have input on functionality, design or technology? Interested in joining the development process? Feel free to comment or shoot me an e-mail.

Rock on, Tacoma.